Regimes and Opportunity

Neil Lund

2024-10-15

Recap

Opportunity Structures: Kitschelt identified “input” structures and “output” structures as key variables for shaping the trajectory of anti-nuclear movements.

Are there more dimensions to consider here?

Opportunity Structures

(adapted from McAdam, Doug; McCarthy, John D.; Zald, Mayer N.. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings)
Charles Brockett Hanspeter Kriesi Dieter Rucht Sidney Tarrow
Access points Institutional structures Access to the party system Openness of the polity
Elite fragmentation Informal conflict resolution procedures Actor-specific alliance structures Stability of political alignments
Level of repression Configuration of power regarding specific challengers Actor-specific conflict structures Elite divisions

Expanding the scope

  • Kitschelt looks at diversity among a set western democracies, what changes when we extend the scope outside that region/set of regimes?

  • We need to simplify, but how much is too much?

Tilly’s regime types

  • Capacity refers to the state’s ability to affect the distributions of populations, actions, resources, etc. (state power/efficacy)
  • Democracy two generalizations:
    • Democracies tolerate a wider repertoire of dissent
    • Democracies offer more access points where people can influence politics

Democracy and protest

  • Democracies are more likely to have tolerate peaceful protest, but even authoritarian states are likely to have some peaceful demonstrations (as well as some violent ones)

State capacity and protest

  • The associations are less obvious for state capacity, but in general poorer states are less likely to see sustained peaceful protest
  • Importantly, democracy and capacity tend to covary, so its harder to find “high capacity autocracies”

High Capacity Democracies

  • Examples: Contemporary U.S., France, Germany etc.

  • Explicit or implicit legal protections for protest

  • Mechanisms for peaceful transitions or change in policy

  • Ability to effectively repress transgressive contention and reward compliance

Low Capacity Democracies

  • Examples: Jamaica, Tunisia, Ukraine, Brazil*
    • States can’t always effectively use repression, but may fear public opinion.
    • High levels of activity, including some violence, but with concessions from the state

Low Capacity Autocracies

  • Examples: Yemen, Burma

    • States may lack the capacity to repress effectively, but also they don’t offer concessions

    • Protests often evolve into civil war and revolutions

High Capacity Autocracies

  • Examples: China, Hungary*, Iran

    • There’s an (imperfect) correlation between state capacity and democracy, so these are comparatively more rare

    • Contention happens, but it rarely threatens (and sometimes strengthens) the state.

Fu, Diana. “Disguised collective action in China.” Comparative Political Studies 50.4 (2017): 499-527.

Repression

…the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions

- Davenport, Christian. “State repression and political order.” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 10.1 (2007): 1-23.

  • Excludes more common “law enforcement” activities that don’t involve expressive activity

  • Excludes subtle (and sometimes deliberate) structural inequalities that can reduce protests, as well as positive incentives that could undermine protest (co-option)

  • Emphasizes “first amendment type rights” like freedom of speech, association, press etc.

Repression

  • All states use repression in response to threats! Democracies repress less (although there’s some debate about the shape of this relationship)

  • But they vary in terms of their willingness, ability to use it, the actions/groups they repress due to both state capacity and leader characteristics

“I no longer wanted to fight. At whom was I going to fire? At children and youths who did not completely realize what they were doing?” - Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (president of El Salvador from 1935 - 1944)

Quoted in: Brockett, Charles D.. Political Movements and Violence in Central America (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics) (p. 199). Cambridge University Press.

Rational Calculus

For leaders

  • Costs: loss of legitimacy, backlash, disruption

  • Constraints: inability to target protesters effectively, lack of competent/loyal police or military

  • Alternatives: co-opting protests or granting concessions

For protesters

  • How likely/how severe is the punishment? How important is my contribution?

  • Can I avoid consequences by staying home? Are there less dangerous alternatives to open dissent?

Impacts of repression

  • The impact of repression is wildly inconsistent: sometimes it discourages dissent, other times it causes more of it, or the relationship is contingent on timing.

  • The same kinds of extreme pressure appear to work in some circumstances, and backfire in others, or work briefly and then fail.

    • “there are theoretical arguments for all conceivable basic relations between coercion and protest”

Repression and opportunity

At their most extreme levels, repressive strategies might prompt backlash because they conclude there’s no real difference.

Let us not go as sheep to the slaughter! It is true that we are weak and defenceless, but resistance is the only reply to the enemy! Brothers! It is better to fall as free fighters, than to live by the grace of the murderers. Resist! To the last breath. (as cited in Shneidman, 2002, p. 4)

Rachel Einwohner finds that ghetto uprisings were most likely in Nazi Germany when residents were most hopeless.

Impacts of repression: Iranian Revolution

Rasler, K. (1996). Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest in the Iranian Revolution. American Sociological Review, 61(1), 132–152.

Rasler, K. (1996). Concessions, Repression, and Political Protest in the Iranian Revolution. American Sociological Review, 61(1), 132–152.
  • January 1978 op-ed condemning Khomeini. Students/Clergy protests and the state uses live ammunition to disperse the crowd.

  • February 1978: protests break out in multiple cities during memorial services (pattern of protests every 40 days ensues)

  • February - August, 1978: Shah makes multiple concessions to protest leaders

  • August 19, 1979: Cinema Rex fire kills 400, revolutionaries blame the Shah

Impacts of repression: Iranian Revolution

  • September 4, 1978: hundreds of thousands march through Tehran during Eid al-Fitr.

  • September 8, 1978: Shah declares martial law, and soldiers kill 64 protesters who remain in the streets after curfew.

  • Nationwide strikes and protests through the remainder of the year. Shah flees in January 1979

Impacts of repression: Iranian Revolution

  • Why did repression seem to backfire here? (non-exhausive explanations):

    • Backlash - repression that’s seen as illegitimate can increase/radicalize support for opposition movements

      • (deterrence only works if you can tell what behaviors are prohibited)
    • Signalling - repression is a signal of state weakness.

    • Substitution - repression targets the most effective mechanisms, so activists do more to sustain the same level of dissent

    • Diffusion - repression of student activism drove protests to the Mosques, which in turn made them easier to spread

Issues

  • Are regimes endogenous to protests? (Protesters can change the state)
  • What about regimes that mix democratic and undemocratic institutions?
  • How/why does non-violent protest change the calculus for repression?

Data: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED)

For data on repression events:

Advantages

  • Global data on conflict events including non-violent protest and police repression

  • hand-coded using news, government and NGO reports

Disdvantages

  • short time frame (Africa from 1997, rest of the world mostly post 2010)

  • tactics and claims are not tracked systematically

  • messy coding of actors and fatalities

link (requires registration to download)

Data: Varieties of Democracy

For data on regime types in general:

  • Primarily expert-coded characteristics of democracy and non-democracy worldwide

  • Extensive coverage by year on a wide variety of indicators

link

(can also be downloaded using the vdemdata R package)